OpenAI’s $500 ChatGPT Pro Max Plan Isn’t for Every Month. It’s for the Busy Ones.

Last updated September 25, 2026

I pay $100 a month for ChatGPT right now, so a report about a $500 ChatGPT Pro Max tier got my attention on Wednesday. The number doesn’t bother me. I can picture the month I’d buy it.

What leaked, and what OpenAI has said (nothing)

On September 24, TestingCatalog reported references to a “ChatGPT Pro Max” plan at $500 a month inside unreleased subscription strings in the ChatGPT app, first shared on X by researcher Tibor Blaho. OpenAI has said nothing, and it isn’t on the pricing page.

The description differs from the $200 Pro plan mainly through “Fastest Work and Codex,” so the pitch is speed on the agent tools. Higher limits “may also be part of the package, although that is not confirmed yet.”

TestingCatalog guesses the tier builds on GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast, which already runs on Cerebras hardware, though OpenAI hasn’t connected the two. DevDay is September 29.

Who it’s for, according to the report

TestingCatalog says the tier “could target developers, researchers, and professional users running long agentic workloads rather than regular ChatGPT users.” If you use ChatGPT for emails and dinner plans, this isn’t aimed at you.

On September 11, OpenAI paused new signups for the $200 Pro plan because GPT-6 Astra demand outran capacity. The pause left the $100 Pro tier alone, so today the ladder runs Plus at $20, Pro at $100, and Pro at $200.

My take: buy it for the busy month, then drop it

I’m not upset about the price. Most months, AI is basically my personal assistant. It helps me write apps, it reads the book I’m working on and flags plot holes, it brainstorms with me, and it helps me keep six or seven family websites running. It even feeds my Stoicism channel on YouTube, finding Stoic quotes I don’t already know that fit what people are dealing with. For all of that, a $200-level plan is plenty, and my $100 plan covers it. Then every once in a while, and my ADHD brain is part of this, I get three or four ideas I want to run at the same time, with two or three apps going at once, and that’s the month $200 stops being enough.

If $500 buys roughly five of my $100 plans’ worth of usage, I could burn through that in a burst month. I couldn’t keep it all year without hunting for ways to use it. This reads like a plan you buy for the one month you have ten things lined up, then cancel.

What people are saying

The r/codex thread on the leak had a few hundred replies by Thursday night, and most were about timing, since Claude Opus 5.5 landed two days earlier.

Weird time to drop it when they just fell behind, but okay.

u/CapableJury861, the top reply

I can’t think of anything OpenAI has to offer that would be worth 500 to me. […] Now with current Opus 5.5 performance i’d rather have 3x 100 Anthropic plan than try whatever a 500 has to offer lol.

u/throwaway490215

I actually know someone who could benefit from this. They are small business owners operating an online shop. […] They already successfully replaced 2 employees with 2 Codex $200 subs. To them it’s much cheaper than hiring real person so they would pay the $500 without even blinking.

u/a1454a

That last one is closer to how I see it. The plan makes sense for a specific month or a specific business, and most of the thread just doesn’t have that month.

FAQ

It’s a leak until OpenAI says otherwise, and DevDay is four days away.

Related reading: GPT-6 Sol and Luna are here | What changes if you pay for Claude | Picking Instant vs Thinking in ChatGPT | New to AI? Start here